The Final Struggle definition
The Final Struggle continues ‘Man and Myth’ by means of a relativist position which returns back to the remarks of ‘Imagination and Progress’: “[r]elativism [...] starts by teaching that reality is an illusion, but it concludes that illusion is, in turn, a reality. It denies that there are absolute truths, but it realizes that people must believe in their relative truth as if they were absolute. [...] Relativistic philosophy proposes, therefore, to obey the law of myth.” (2011: 389–90) And this relation of absolute and relative is situated in terms of the dialectic of the concrete and the abstract: “the revolutionary proletariat [...] lives the reality of a final struggle. Humanity, meanwhile, from an abstract point of view, lives the illusion of a final struggle.” (2011, 390 emphasis added) Thus, on the one hand, there is the abstract plane of indeterminateness whereby discrete relative truths succeed one another along history, in a movement for which no ‘final struggle’ can be asserted. On the other, there is the concrete, experiential plane of certainties that social groups carry, a plane that is built upon determinate struggles against reality as it is actually given. Enlightening this difference, philosophical relativism provides Mariátegui a pathway beyond the deadlock of a reason all-too pleased with a present identical to itself.